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Monday, 18 March 2013

Pope Francis buys Argentina’s Kirchner some time

Buenos Aires. When President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela died on March 5 his
political ally president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina arrived
within 24 hours to show her respects.

However, she then returned to Buenos Aires the next day, on
March 7, and didn't attend Chávez’s funeral. This caused some pundits in her home country to opine that she was
either trying to distance herself from the legacy of the deceased socialist leader,
or that she feared being upstaged by Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, another friend
of Chávez.

Either way, back at home problems were mounting: inflation
was on the rise, and the country’s two main right-of-center newspapers, La
Nacion and Clarín, were maintaining their critical
stance against the Peronist
president.

Then, Kirchner got very lucky (or, for some, perhaps a minor
miracle occurred): the archbishops of the Catholic Church, in their wisdom,
picked an Argentine, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, to be Pope Francis (Francisco). The president, a devout Catholic, didn’t waste
much time getting herself to Rome to pay her respects.

And the conservative press was effectively muted. La Nacion, in the first eight pages of
its March 18 print edition, had no fewer than 21 stories devoted to the Pope. In fact, there was only one story in those pages that did not cover Francisco, and
that was about an airline losing money. In Argentina these days – for some at
least – it is all Pope, all the time.

Kirchner is playing it for all it’s worth, giving the new
Pope a yerba mate kit
(like he doesn’t already have one?), and holding an extended press conference in
Rome expostulating on her audience with the new pontiff.

Meanwhile, the pro-Catholic right-of-center press can only
hold its breath until Kirchner returns home. Then it can get back to bashing
the President for her autocratic ways, such as the fact that she has stopped
all government advertising in La Nacion
and Clarín, and has even gone so far
as to use the threat of government investigations to discourage printers from
serving the two large papers, particularly in rural areas.

There are ill winds blowing in Argentina. Inflation is on
the rise. Kirchner is ramping up the Falkland Islands/Malvinas issue. And Pope
Francisco is facing questions regarding his role in the kidnapping by the military of two ex-priests
during Argentina’s “dirty war”, though in La
politica’s opinion Francisco's biggest challenge will come when the church in Latin
America finally faces its
own legacy of child sexual abuse and cover ups, as have congregations in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

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Podcast: Notes From The Underground

In the podcast Notes From The Underground TE Wilson discusses historical and contemporary attitudes toward crime. Each episode features a one-on-one interview that explores a unique topic. Interviewees include authors, experts, and individuals with personal experiences of crime. These podcasts were originally broadcast through the facilities of Trent Radio in Peterborough, Canada.

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Bicultural and transgender, detective Ernesto Sánchez seeks a missing Canadian woman on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Moving uneasily in a world where benign tourism co-exists with extreme violence, he becomes a pawn in a shadowy power-play between corrupt police and drug cartels. Forced to make hard choices – desperate, wounded, and friendless – Sánchez takes refuge in the lawless mountains of Oaxaca. And discovers his fate.

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